I assume that you don't live in the US? Unfortunately, a large majority of our journalism considers Twitter a primary source and then journalists just quote each other and other articles. Fact checking prior to publishing is not very rigorous for many publications.

"Hmmm. We move our satellites on average once a week and don't put out a press release to say who we maneuvered around..."

(In response to question: so why not post it?)

"Normal part of flying satellites (or should be). Does BA announce every time one of its airplanes steers around a Ryanair aircraft?"

(Response to question: are you using automatic systems?)

We have always had automatic systems on board but always have humans involved in decisions and timing. Automatic systems aren't good enough because data isn't good enough, shared fast enough, and other factors.

1 in 1,000,000. The non-aggressively antagonistic point is moves are a normal occurrence and this satellite was in a graveyard decay orbit - meaning it is not supposed to have any propellant and anyone worried about a collision with ballistic objects needs to be proactive.

1 in 1,000, pulled directly from the article you linked, is 10 times the reasonable threshold, again, what is your point? The sattelite was supposedly a fully operational, active sat. and deorbited as a test, and I don't see any statements on it not having any fuel. How incompetent would you have to be to not leave any fuel at all in it?

And it was already agreed upon by both parties that the spaceX sat wouldnt move - if spaceX had suddenly decided to move, it couldve moved counter to the esa move and caused a collision. Only one sat moves, and days before it was found neither needednto move but that if that changed it would be the esaxs sat to move.

did you even read the article? spacex said literally nothing up until that "bug in the system prevented us from seeing the emails or else we would've moved" statement, which contradicts what you said, and again, is a direct statement from spacex.

I think the biggest issue here is that it wouldn't? couldn't? communicate with SpaceX. They had no idea what was going on. I think there should be an AI program designed to automatically maneuver to a safe orbit once de-orbit's been detected. Then again, it's something that should have been on the satellite to begin with. 7 P's.

Iridium said moves are either debris avoidance or coordinated with cooperation from both sides. Spacex sent terse "won't move". As Spacex is building up their constellation, I would have expected they'd be more proactive in building communication channels with the operators of existing sats below their plane (on deorbit path).

Spacex sent terse "won't move". As Spacex is building up their constellation

SpaceX were performing a test to measure decay and demise of a satellite which had been placed in a graveyard orbit. If they had moved satellite 44 it would have invalidated any test results because such graveyard satellites are supposed to have no propellant remaining, hence unable to move. If SpaceX judged the risk of collision was low (1 in 1,0001 in 1 million) and ESA weren't happy with those odds, it's their decision to move.

They had two months notice and they moved it during the last orbit (30 minutes before). To me it sounds like ESA told SpaceX to move their satellite because of the collision chance, SpaceX looked at the data and said "nah, it's fine bro". ESA disagrees and they probably had a long back and forth trying to get SpaceX to move their satellite since they thought the risk was too high. SpaceX didn't budge and just told them "if you want to avoid it, you move" so ESA waited until the last minute then published this statement because they're mad at SpaceX after the whole exchange.

Esa is not mad at them. They specifically say that SpaceX did nothing wrong.

As for moving in the last moment. Since the orbit times are roughly 90 minutes it doesn't really change much in terms of propellant usage to move it longer than 90 mins before. In fact it gets more and more inaccurate to predict where a satellite will be after a given maneuver when you look further away in time.

Esa decided to move the satellite because they received new collision risks of 1 in 1000, which is ten times riskier than the threshold used by not just ESA but many others. Their actions have nothing to do with politics.

As for what they said about it: the only criticism they voiced of SpaceX was that SpaceX refused to engage in space debris mitigation prior to this incident (according to the forbes article). Sure they used this incident to highlight the need for more research and development in collision avoidance, but it makes the most sense. You have a potential collision with a satellite belonging to a constellation that might be over a thousand satellites in the future. It makes the most sense from a "hey look this is already happening it'll be so much worse in the future" standpoint to highlight this incident specifically.

ESA had new data that said it was a high enough risk, while SpaceX had the old data that said it wasn't a big risk. A "bug in the paging system" made it so SpaceX ghosted them in the correspondence and ESA was left to deal with it on their own. I'd say ESA must have been a bit annoyed at SpaceX after first both agreeing that the situation was fine but when new data comes in SpaceX doesn't respond at all and they are just flat out ignored.

I guess the 30 minute before the event may be standard thing to do, I'd just assume that moving earlier would give you higher margins, but if you just need to move 2-5km away then the difference in fuel would be negligible, as you said. However the reporting is still pretty bad when it says "30 minutes away from collision" when they had 2 months to act and it was all under control the entire time.

The article you linked says in the next paragraph that the probability of collision was estimated at 1/1000 when using more accurate orbital information from the air Force, wouldn't that number be more correct to use?

Spacenews.com have long maintained an anti-SpaceX bias, presumably because they don't use them to advertise. Every article I've read manages to throw shade on SpaceX, subtle or otherwise. However, it wasn't USAF who provided the 1 in 10,000 collision risk figure, that was ESA's assessment based on what they knew about Starlink. I don't think SpaceX agreed with this assessment based on their actions. Sounds like sour grapes from ESA, who are almost as risk adverse as NASA.

That number seems to come directly from ESA though, which may be biased but I don't think would straight up lie on the numbers. It would be nice to hear SpaceX side of the story too, I hope they'll release a statement soon.

Also, what would be a reasonable threshold to perform a collision avoidance manouvre? Given the cost of ESA's satellite (almost half a billion euros in this case) and the catastrofic consequences that a collision would cause, especially to a large and dense constellation like Starlink, 1 in 10000 doesn't look so unreasonable.

They (ESA) not lied necessarily. From their end they calculated 1:1,000 based on data they had. Probably SpaceX calculated a very different value (SOCRATES gives 1:1,000,000) that was more than good enough. The have an ongoing experiment going on with that sat for many moths that would have been invalidated by an active course correction, so they decided not to do so.

I honestly expected the owner of the first "megaconstellation" would establish communication channels/procedures ahead of time with sat owners below their orbit (i.e. affected by decay).

Is it required by law? No. But it could be argued it would be reasonable or in the spirit of cooperation. Given quite recent and abrupt change in Starlink's upper management it wouldn't be surprising if this was planned but "forgotten".

That is understandable, mainstream media has been basically browbeating Elon for years, mainly over Tesla but not restricted to such by any means. Forbes used to be supportive but now appears to have changed camps. This is very polarizing because the campaign of abuse seems to be led by Wall Street assisted by main stream media who simply want to tear down everything Elon has built because he's an innovator. Anyone who isn't angry about this should perhaps read: "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" for perspective.

TL;DR Roman empire declined and fell due to excessive political influence and internecine conflict. At the beginning of empire Romans were willing to sacrifice themselves for an ideal, by the end they were just fighting over scraps of money.

Elon said the best place to found tech companies is America - a country built on the ideal of freedom. Because of that freedom citizen's are free to express their creativity and capable of great deeds. This aligns Elon with early epoc Rome which despised tyranny and exalted in their freedom.

Wall street believes there might be a downturn and fighting a desperate rearguard action to delay the day, similar to what occurred leading up to 2008. Tesla spells doom to them because it threatens to collapse the auto industry, which is central to the economy and could trigger the expected downturn.

Due to Elon's creativity they have latched onto him as the weak link and pursue him piteously anyway they can. SEC should stop them but their job is to make sure downturns aren't brought on by share manipulation and malfeasance so they turn a blind eye to criminal behaviour by short sellers.

I believe ultimately Elon will triumph because he's a juggernaut who doesn't know how to quit. And then the short-sellers will discover how much money can be made from a bottomed out market where nobody wants to trade shares.

Not exceptionally rare but not very common either - it’s essentially a digital credit card skimmer. It got there either due to an insecure website design or perhaps a vulnerability in a third party vendor.

Not the first time, have seen malware on their site several times, and in my case it was always associated with the ads they were running (bad screening of malicious advertising, but malicious advertising pays better)

Common, even on mainstream sites - which is why ad blockers like UBlock Origin are very important as one of your defense lines. Mostly it's 3rd party ads and not the site getting hacked to serve up malware.

(A high percentage of people infected got it through ad networks, not because they visited some shady site.)

Same reason - the title assumed SpaceX are the bad guys. Shouldn't assume anything, just describe the situation. The other article did that just fine, but Forbes is trying to attract clicks. A bit too much.

It's jumping to conclusions based on incomplete information and uses derisive language and makes statements of fact that simply aren't.

SpaceX didn't refuse to move because they weren't asked to. The calculated chance of a collision changed over time - it started out as 1 in 1 million, increased to 1 in 50000 and increased again to 1 in 1000. ESA and SpaceX have the same information available to them.
SpaceX didn't ignore ESA either.

When the chance of a collision was still low enough for a maneuver to be unnecessary, ESA and SpaceX agreed that a) no action was needed but that b) if there was, then Aeolus would be the one to move.

Well, they weren't asked, they just said they wouldn't maneuver. And for the last time, we don't know of any issues with the satellite. SpaceX is testing deorbit procedures. The satellite is fully functional as far as we know. Also, I expect some discussion to go on regarding the maneuver, yes.

You're right! I guess I was wrong to trust O'Callaghan's source. I can only assume that the source decided to interpret SpaceX's lack of response as a direct refusal which obviously seems pretty weak.

As for the satellite being intentionally deorbited, the recent Scott Manley video on this topic discusses it and this article from SpaceNews talks about it as well.

Most, but not all, Starlink satellites have used onboard electric propulsion to reach their operational 550-kilometer orbit. SpaceX is deorbiting at least five of the first 60 satellites — three that malfunctioned and two deliberately for test purposes.

SpaceX did not say that. If you believe otherwise please present a credible source such as a copy of the relevant email OR an official statement from SpaceX or ESA.

The word “refuse” was used by an unofficial source and could easily have been an emotive response to a belated email Fromm SpaceX stating that they are unable to comply with ESA’s request.

The title is inaccurate because it uses the word “refused” which implies that SpaceX are choosing not to act when they otherwise have the capability to do so. When a better story is produced in a couple of days we will find that the email exchange was more along the lines of, ESA asking SpaceX to act, SpaceX saying, “sorry we can’t do more than 10m/s/day at this altitude” with the anger from some actors inside ESA being due to SpaceX not responding to emails sent to various addresses.

In short, the issue here is not SpaceX being “arrogant” or “refusing” anything. The issue is as ESA highlighted, which is the requirement for human intervention at all. They want an automated way for, sat, ESA’s computers to communicate with SpaceX computers to say, “our satellite will be here then, are there any collision risks?” And SpaceX to respond, “yes, two satellites have a collision risk greater than accepted standards. Per international agreement X we will lower our orbit by 5km and you raise yours by 5km for this encounter?” Then ESA can respond “sure thing!”

SpaceX is anticipating this with their attempts to produce an autonomous system which will adjust orbits in advance of ESA bringing up the collision risk.

So chances are that elsewhere in the system there is discussion between SpaceX and ESA about advance notification of collision risks and intended actions (intended because the orbital adjustment will be performed in the future), and this Tweet thread from ESA is part of their awareness campaign in advance of their budget review in November.

Unfortunately there's no "accepted standard" for collision risk. There's also an inherent tension challenge where scientific satellites or other high-value missions will likely have much more conservative acceptable risks than fault-tolerant constellations like Starlink.

International Agreement X is what ESA wants established between operators before these megaconstellations become much larger: basically an automated system for identifying, notifying and acting on collision risks. I don’t believe there is necessarily any “tension” so much as the expectation that it is the operator of the more risk averse hardware that needs to act when risks pass their more conservative thresholds.

Fair point, and I struck the word “tension” because it has a connotation I didn’t intend. I do think that there may be a concern where high-value payloads are constantly required to maneuver while megaconstellations rarely do because of differing risk thresholds, though.

That discussion has not been taking place … according to Jonathan's interpretation of his source's statements. Yet at the same time, ESA and SpaceX have communicated regarding possible manoeuvres for this collision avoidance, according to the article he wrote.

For the moment, just put aside all the words that Jonathan wrote and focus only on the stuff he quotes as having come from a named ESA source, especially given that what he wrote as a quote from his source directly contradicts his tweet about "SpaceX refused to move their satellite," and his opinion that "Aeolus was in that orbit first therefore they have right of way" which is complete nonsense.

It's not a problem that a deorbiting satellite is not able to take collision avoidance action. The expectation is that a deorbiting satellite will be doing so because it is broken. When a car breaks down on the highway, everyone else moves around it until the operator or their agent has successfully removed it from the roadway. In addition if everyone took evasive action you could end up in a scenario where what would have been a 500m flyby ends up being a 0.5m bullseye.

There is a lot of information that Jonathan's source provided which Jonathan left out of the article, which some journalist or another will end up uncovering in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, understand that the entire purpose of the ESA Operations tweet thread was to point out there is this thing we do which we're currently handling fine with a small staff of humans, but once these megaconstellations (plural) start taking to the skies we're going to be quickly overwhelmed and have two things we need to accomplish before more satellites fill the skies: first is to automate our collision detection and avoidance planning, second is to improve methods of communication with other satellite operators to ensure that critical information doesn't have to be exchanged by emails between humans.

It would not surprise me in the least to find that SpaceX is trying to get ESA to do things the SpaceX way (possibly a HTTP RPC call, returning information that SpaceX considers to be relevant in YAML format), and ESA wants a more generic and portable protocol for information exchange similar to what freelance sites currently provide but with all the extra data that satellite operators need including planned manoeuvres for the next few days (and being Europe, probably as XML RPC with a very strict XSD).

This StarLink satellite failed to make it to orbit which is why it is being deorbited.

The statement that this is the first email that SpaceX has sent is ridiculous and clearly taken out of context. The truth of the matter will come out soon enough once someone decides to take more than two hours to rush out a clickbait article.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. There's already a post link of the incident that has much more accurate information.

The satellite was de-orbiting already. The Hall thruster the satellite uses doesn't have enough thrust to maneuver it, and the closest approach was 3.9km. ESA allows for much closer approaches with debris, this is more an attempt for ESA to gain funding for an autonomous avoidance system, which is much needed anyways but still this event isn't out of the ordinary.

this is more an attempt for ESA to gain funding for an autonomous avoidance system

This doesn't make sense to me, as they'd have a more compelling argument if they said "SpaceX couldn't do anything, we need more options out there." The narrative "The other guy wouldn't do his part" just makes regulators say "oh, well the other guy should do his part." not "Oh, here's more money."

I don't think the satellite in question was active. The maneuvers are part of ordinary satellite operation. There will be a need for more maneuvers once constellations are built but that's not an issue on SpaceX's part. The issue is that we need an autonomous avoidance system. In ESA's tweet they ask for funding for such a system and don't blame SpaceX at all. As low earth orbit becomes more crowded we will need systems in place to keep things running smoothly, like air traffic control. An autonomous system would be best.

There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for satellite operators to reposition their spacecraft. It is entirely routine and unnewsworthy. One satellite operator pointing fingers at another satellite operator to the world press shows how petty they are. This is like a deranged sailor howling to the press about how he had to go through the trouble of sailing a few feet around another company's boat while traversing a crowded river.

ESA is drawing attention to what they perceive as procedural defects where coordinating activity with SpaceX required humans sending emails or getting on the blower. What ESA wants is basically a higher resolution equivalent to current publicly visible satellite tracking ephemera (ephemerises? Ephemerii?) to accompany their planned “AI” satellite navigation and collision avoidance system.

ESA budget up for review in November, they want to rattle sabres to ensure the EU bureaucrats are listening.

They aren't pointing fingers: “There are no rules in space,” he says. “Nobody did anything wrong. Space is there for everybody to use. There’s no rule that somebody was first here. Basically on every orbit you can encounter other objects. Space is not organized. And so we believe we need technology to manage this traffic.”

“We see it as part of our changing environment,” says Stijn Lemmens, a space debris analyst at ESA. “We want to raise awareness in this sense, that there’s quite a bit of work that needs to be done on how to make sure that these type of operations will run smoothly in the future.”

Mods can we ban forbes.com/sites/ ? It seems that people are confused by the Forbes blogging platform and think it's actual Forbes editorial approved by Forbes. Literally anyone can pay and get access.

I voted for approval because I thought it brought up some different discussion points about SpaceX's automated collission avoidance (or lack thereof in this case), possibly about the ability of Starlink to even do that with their electric propulsion.

​

About Forbes sites. Anybody can make a twitter account, a blog or anything. I think our community should be able to distinguish them in this case.

And, for the last seven years I spent on this subreddit, I was under the impression (by my own fault for not reading) that forbes.com articles I opened were written by actual forbes.com journalists. A flair or an AutoMod top-comment wouldn't be such a bad idea for this kind of article.

I had no idea about this "sites" thing, I just knew Forbes publishes a print business magazine and always wondered why their online articles seem to be really hit or miss in terms of journalistic quality, maybe this sites blog thing was the reason.

If Twitter or Facebook had a long history of publishing a print news magazine before they became a social media site, I could see some confusion there too as to which links are actual news stories and which are random opinion pieces from unknown internet users.

I'm glad Matt Desch of Iridium chimed in on this. Moving satellites is a normal, regularly occurring thing. It's only makes headlines when people can write a title that's anti-SpaceX. Those headlines get more clicks. Nothing to see here. Just clickbait.

At first glance, "won't" appears worse than "can't", because it seems arrogant (SpaceX entered ESA's established orbit), however, it's sometimes better to appear stubborn than weak, so "won't" may be a better choice than admitting "can't" at this point.

What I mean is this they have a right to competitive secrecy and don't need the media picking over the status of each experiential piece of hardware.

My problem is everyone is dismissing this news as bullshit, when it clearly isn't. And that not every negative piece on SpaceX is because someone is out to get them which is basically what your first comment said.

They do have the ability to avoid satellites. They have Hall thrusters to change their orbits, and one of Starlinks abilities is to autonomously avoid debris or other satellites. Which it clearly didn't do.

The team has been trying to contact SpaceX for months and have been ignored up until this point. And when they did finally say something it was them deciding not to do anything. That's how they fucked up.

ESA stated that it gave a collision risk of 1/1000 by their analysis. Distance at closest approach isn't particularly relevant. Small uncertainties in position and velocity can alter orbital elements in different ways, so there are situations where a further separation at closest approach can be more dangerous for the satellites. You can play around with SOCRATES to find that maximum probability of collision and minimum range are correlated, but not particularly strongly.

According to a list of conjunctions called the Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reports Assessing Threatening Encounters in Space (SOCRATES), maintained by the Center for Space Standards & Innovation, Aeolus was predicted to have a close approach shortly after 7 a.m. Eastern Sept. 2 with a satellite identified as “Starlink AV” for its international designation, 2019-029AV. The two satellites were predicted to come within about four kilometers of each other, at a relative velocity of 14.4 kilometers per second. However, the SOCRATES data predicted a very low probability of collision — less than one in one million — which ordinarily would be far below the threshold for an avoidance maneuver.

The same article says, in the next paragraph, that while the probability of collision was 1 in a million when using publicly available data, ESA said that the collision probability increased to 1/1000 when using more accurate orbit information from the Air Force.

But the overall question is valid — should we really be managing satellite traffic via email, and isn’t it obvious that there should be well defined rules for who gets the right of way?

Like, do people predict these potential collisions weeks ahead of time so that someone getting around to checking that email isn’t a big deal, and there is plenty of time to react? And if it works now, will it still work when we have many tens of thousands of satellites from competing internet companies up there in the future? Also, what about the potential for two satellites who are maneuvering to avoid a collision to accidentally maneuver into a collision because they happened to simultaneously move into each other’s new paths?

If one agency is already doing these maneuvers like 20 times per year, then I imagine that a larger constellation could approach a few thousand annual maneuvers, in which case that 1/10000 minuscule chance of a collision won’t be so minuscule anymore...

So as this is /spacex, not the lounge, can we at least get a [misleading title] flair, as its now been prettymuch confirmed that spacex and the esa already had agreed it wasnt a large risk, and, if/when it became such, the esa would move?

I'm disappointed in this sub for being so biased against this article and ESA in general. Yes, ESA has performed 28 maneuvers this year, but this is an important case to draw attention to. Avoidance maneuvers are almost always dead satellites and debris; this one is a live satellite. They're trying to point out how problematic the nonexistence of laws regarding who has to do the maneuver is. Not to mention, SpaceX flat up decided not to do the maneuver forcing ESA to do it which sets a bad precedent for just ignoring problems. Also SpaceX has been completely silent on the issue so far publicly and seems to have been pretty brief with ESA. We need better communication on this kind of thing and if SpaceX won't do it privately than ESA will bring it to the public eye.

Edit: It turns out SpaceX and ESA originally agreed to not move, but SpaceX missed an email later on that showed the chance of collision of being a problem. O'Callagahan's source from inside ESA presumably thought this was a denial to move and thus told him that SpaceX refused to move. On ESA's part, I still believe they handled this well. It's important to bring attention to the lack of rules in space and hopefully this will spur some change for the better. They made it clear this was not a personal attack on SpaceX.

There is no problem with the ESA, they're right in that we need a autonomous avoidance system. T

he problem is the headline is exaggerating the maneuver and putting fault on SpaceX. There is no blame, maneuvers like this are part of normal satellite operation.

If you read the tweet the ESA is just saying that as the constellation is built they will need to do more maneuvers and building an AI system that can coordinate these maneuvers instead of relying on manual maneuvers is definitely needed.

1 in 1000000 chance of collision per SOCRATES. Anyone insisting that this was anything other than a political hatchet job against SoaceX is not looking at anything other than a politically motivated set.of tweets and some yellow journalism.

Given that the ESA tweets are barely dry and the author of the Forbes article published before getting any answers from SpaceX, can you blame people for labelling a blatant clickbait headline as blatant clickbait?

The Twitter thread this article was based on points out exactly the situation: ESA budget review in November, ESA has a massive automation project they want money for, so they have to raise public awareness of the issue so that the EU suits will have some hope of understanding what the however-many-billion Euros is going to be spent on.

This is the bias I'm talking about. Obviously O'Callaghan doesn't have to wait until SpaceX comments to write his article. Even the Space News article by Foust didn't wait. The news was hot and SpaceX declined to comment. That isn't unethical.

The article by Forbes is not clickbait, either. It defends it's title with the facts presented within. If this made SpaceX look good no one would even blink an eye on this sub.

Even Matt Desch of Iridium thinks this is ridiculous, though, and he's more involved with satellite traffic than you are. Anti-SpaceX headlines get more clicks, and that's why people write them. It's that simple.

No it's a problem because, in general, right of way laws don't exist and they need to be set in place. ESA is drawing attention to this. SpaceX more or less chose to play chicken and that's why this is the time to speak up on the lack of rules governing who should move.

I read somewhere else that the satellites were projected to be 3.9 km apart at their closest approach. Perhaps that is why SpaceX decided no special action was required? It sounds like avoidance maneuvers weren't strictly necessary.

Edit: Actually that point is already raised in this thread we're in. Maybe that's where I read it...

My issue is more with the blogger/twitterati trying to make hay on this than ESA. I think their response is a little hyperbolic, but their budget is coming up and I support the automated tracking system project and I think this is a good example of its use.

Hall effect thrusters are pretty low impulse, right? Aren't they on the order of just a few Newtons at most? I suspect it's enough to slowly and gradually move away from something, but I don't think you could do any abrupt or last-second sort of thing. Ephemeris data can be projected pretty far in advance with pretty good accuracy though so presumably you shouldn't be "surprised" by something and have to do a last-minute maneuver very often as long as all objects are being tracked and projected.

With the couple kilowatts of power available to Starlink, a hall effect thruster won't get more than 0.1N. A typical collision avoidance maneuver only needs a meter per second change in velocity. Either way, last-minute maneuvers shouldn't ever be needed so I strongly doubt thruster power limits Starlink's ability to avoid obstacles.